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NUCLEAR
'The Bomb is Back' by Jonathan Schell
For Iraq Inspectors, 'Yellow Cake' and Other Quarries
Arab Ministers Welcome U.N. Resolution on Iraq
Where First Strikes Are Far From the Last Resort
Nuclear Deceit
North Korea Told to Dismantle Nuclear Arms Project Promptly
My Private Seat At Pyongyang's Table
Anti-artillery laser successfully tested
Contolled Burn
After Iraq, Bush will attack his real target
For Powell, A Long Path To a Victory
'Baghdad's Moment of Truth,'
Rice Defends CIA Missile Strike
MILITARY
U.S. Said to Advise Colombia Sale
UK forges £1bn secret arms deal with Thailand
Germ - Warfare Negotiators Try Again
England Prepping for Possible War
Confrontation Over Kaliningrad
Pressure Mounts on Iraq to Accept U.N. Demands
Disarming of Iraq still no safe bet
Iraq Media Says World Defeated U.S. War Plans
Netanyahu pledges to stick by US Mideast 'road map'
Israeli Forces Kill Palestinian Suspected of Planning Bus Attacks
Israeli Helicopters Fire Into Gaza After Palestinian Shooting Attack
Clouds hang over NATO's big bang expansion
Party Chief Wants U.S. Out of Pakistan
MI6 'halted bid to arrest bin Laden'
Syria warns of traps in UN resolution
U.N. Plans Immediate Test of Iraq Inspections
At Navy school in Monterey, voices of skepticism about Iraq war
US ready for war 'by next month'
Building a War:
War Plan in Iraq Sees Large Force and Quick Strikes
Modern-day blitzkrieg
For Gulf War Veterans, A Conflict Within
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
White House Weighs Letting Military Tribunal Try Moussaoui
Victim Killed in Yemen Tied by U.S. to Cell in Buffalo
ENERGY AND OTHER
The burning questions of hydrogen
Sun's rays to roast Earth as poles flip
ACTIVISTS
ITALY Florence Wary as Opponents of War Stage a Huge March
6 Chinese Detained Outside Party Congress
Anti-War Activists Protest in Florence
Students Protest In Iran
Iran Students Protest Death Sentence for Second Day
Activists Vow Europe - Wide Protests Against Iraq War
Belgium War Protest Turns Violent
Why We Must Resist an Invasion of Iraq
Tolerating Protest Is The Downside To Being President
Vigil in Iraq was not pro-Saddam
-------- NUCLEAR
'The Bomb is Back' by Jonathan Schell
What can be done about the growing nuclear threat?
November-December
Sojourners Magazine
http://www.sojo.net/magazine/index.cfm/action/sojourners/issue/soj0211/article/021110.html
The world has entered a new nuclear age, a second nuclear age. The danger is rising that nuclear weapons will be used against the United States. Just as bad, the danger is rising that the United States will use nuclear weapons against others. A paradoxical product of the new danger is the Bush administration's proposal to achieve the nuclear disarmament of Iraq (which may or may not be trying to build nuclear weapons) by overthrowing the regime of Saddam Hussein. To understand why, we have to look back to the beginning of the post-Cold War period.
When the Cold War ended, many Americans, encouraged by official statements, came to believe that nuclear danger might be a thing of the past. The conclusion was not surprising. The world's great nuclear arsenals, we had been told for some 40 years, were built for a purpose-waging the Cold War-and that purpose melted away with the disappearance of the Soviet Union. Might not the arsenals also melt away? What earthly purpose did they serve? Russia was our friend. Could it possibly make sense any longer to threaten it with annihilation-and to go on enduring the threat of annihilation at Russian hands? And indeed, reductions were occurring under the auspices of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, and more could be expected. Perhaps nuclear weapons were now simply the detritus of an age of peril that had passed, and would be carted away. Perhaps one day we'd wake up and discover that the last warhead had been dismantled.
The large hopes and modest achievements of the early post-Cold War years, however, bred complacency rather than a determination to act. Opportunity was mistaken for accomplishment, and little was done. Nuclear danger dropped out of public consciousness. Nuclear arms control negotiations slowed to a creep. In the ensuing atmosphere of official and public indifference, a shockingly different future began to take shape. It was a future that had its roots in the very genetic code of the nuclear threat. Nuclear arsenals are based on scientific and technical knowledge. It is the destiny of knowledge to spread. In the absence of clear political decisions to constrain the weapons, nuclear proliferation must be the result. During the Cold War, nuclear danger grew to threaten all points of the compass. In the post-Cold War period, if current trends are not reversed, nuclear danger will in addition arise at all points of the compass.
Yet if we are to understand the origins of the new nuclear dangers, we must grasp their connection with the old ones. Existing nuclear arsenals-the legacy of the Cold War-are inextricably linked to the budding arsenals of our time. Proliferation (to new countries or terrorists), in a word, is linked to possession (by the existing nuclear powers), and we cannot hope to address the former without addressing the latter.
IN THE EARLY years of the Clinton administration, it became clear that the United States would not seize the immense opportunity for nuclear disarmament that the end of the Cold War presented. The United States had already brushed aside Gorbachev's proposal to eliminate nuclear weapons by the year 2000. Clinton's Nuclear Posture Review, announced as an attempt to reconsider the need for nuclear forces in the post-Soviet era, concluded that things should remain substantially the same as before: Even in the absence of the Cold War enemy, the United States would retain immense nuclear arsenals and threaten their use-not merely in retaliation but even in a first strike. In early 1998, news leaked out that a new Presidential Decision Directive had been issued. One of its conclusions, as Robert G. Bell, a member of Clinton's National Security Council, told The Washington Post, was that the United States should retain nuclear weapons "for the indefinite future."
These critical decisions by the United States, matched by comparable decisions by the other Cold War nuclear powers, were little remarked on by the public, but they were watched closely in other capitals, where decisions whether to build new nuclear arsenals were being made. The most important were New Delhi, where the Indian government, already the possessor of a "peaceful" non-weaponized bomb, was deciding whether to become a full-fledged nuclear power, and Islamabad, where the Pakistani government, nervously eyeing India, was asking itself the same question. If nuclear weapons were to be the currency of power in the new age, India reasoned, then India must have them. Continued renunciation would constitute "nuclear apartheid," its foreign minister said.
In May 1998, India conducted five nuclear tests. Pakistan responded with six. The South Asian nuclear arms race was underway. In early 2002, the two powers engaged in the first full-scale nuclear confrontation of the nuclear age entirely unrelated to the Cold War. Other countries-including Iraq, Iran, and North Korea-also were developing nuclear programs. Recently Yasuo Fukuda, chief of staff to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan, aired his opinion that Japan might have to reconsider its ban on nuclear weapons in its armed forces, and though the government disavowed any such intention, other important figures in Japan voiced their agreement.
Meanwhile, proliferation was increasing the danger of nuclear terrorism. Plainly, the more nuclear powers there are in the world, the more likely it is that nuclear weapons or nuclear materials will fall into the hands of terrorists. The poor guardianship of Russian materials is an enduring international scandal. The danger is acute that Pakistani weapons or materials, many of whose managers are Islamic fundamentalists, will fall into terrorist hands. Before Sept. 11, one veteran of the Pakistani weapon program, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, paid several visits to Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden has claimed to possess nuclear weapons, and though we may doubt the truth of his claim, no one can dismiss the possibility that his al Qaeda network or some other terrorist group may soon acquire one and use it against the United States or another country.
BUT MOST STARTLING has been the revolution in the United States' nuclear policy unveiled since the attack of Sept. 11. It threatens nothing less than a full-scale nuclear revival-a worldwide re-legitimization of nuclear weapons and a resurgence, in this country and elsewhere, of reliance upon them for military purposes.
The United States has always been the world's leader in matters nuclear. Our country invented the atomic bomb, was its first and only user, invented the H-bomb, developed the strategy of deterrence that guided and rationalized the Cold War buildup, and pioneered almost every innovation in delivery vehicles of the nuclear age. Now, by finding new uses for nuclear weapons, building new nuclear weapons and delivery vehicles, and building new anti-nuclear defenses, the United States once again is taking the lead in the nuclearization of the international arena.
Reversing 50 years of precedent, the Bush administration has decided to deal with proliferation not through diplomacy and treaties but through the use of force, including nuclear force. This is the radical policy shift that underlies the administration's call to overthrow the government of Iraq by force. In his 2002 State of the Union address, Bush melded nonproliferation policy into the war on terrorism, lumping three potential nuclear proliferators-Iraq, Iran, and North Korea-together in the "axis of evil," to whom he delivered something of an ultimatum. "The United States of America," he announced, "will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons." If in the '90s continued possession had led to proliferation, proliferation now had led to pre-emption. That is, having failed to put a stick in the gears of proliferation by committing itself to abolition, the United States now proposes to stop it by military means-by "counter proliferation." Meanwhile, the United States will seek to defend itself against retaliation by building a missile defense system-a system that will do nothing, of course, to protect against bombs delivered by car, boat, or truck.
A new policy, called "offensive deterrence," has come into effect. Its linchpin, as in the planning for war in Iraq, is the pre-emptive strike, conventional and nuclear. The president has made it known to the world in the bluntest terms. Though deterrence and containment-the mainstays of Cold War policy-will remain in effect in some areas, the new policy will be to attack first. America, the president said in his speech to the graduating class at West Point, must "be ready to strike at a moment's notice in any dark corner of the world." For "Deterrence-the promise of massive retaliation against nations-means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend. Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies." Thus the United States must "be ready for pre-emptive action."
A new Nuclear Posture Review, leaked to the press in March, added detail to the new policy. New nuclear weapons, including something actually called a "Robust Earth Penetrator," would be built. A new plant to build nuclear weapons would start production in 2030. A new ICBM would be readied for the year 2020, a new submarine-launched missile for 2030, a new bomber for 2040. A widening array of nuclear targets-Russia, China, Libya, Sudan, North Korea, Iraq, Iran-were named.
As these new dangers were being born, were the old dangers from the Cold War arsenals at least being liquidated? No. The recently signed agreement by Bush and President Vladimir Putin of Russia cutting operational strategic weapons to about 2,000 on each side over the next 10 years will remove the weapons from delivery vehicles but not dismantle them. In the year 2012-21 years after the fall of the Soviet Union-there would still be more than 10,000 nuclear warheads in the American arsenal. Even the operational arsenal of some 2,000 will be enough for the two countries-putative allies-to destroy one another many times over.
The new American policy provides the missing link in a vicious circle that is as dangerous as the arms race of the Cold War, if not more so. In this new process, nuclear possession goads proliferation (including proliferation to terrorist groups); proliferation goads missile defenses and pre-emption; and missile defenses and pre-emption in turn goad proliferation.
The policy, whose first step is the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, seeks to prevent proliferation and safeguard the United States. It can do neither. It in fact generates the very threat it hopes to remove. It is a path not to safety but to nuclear proliferation and nuclear war. The vicious circle needs to be disrupted by a beneficial one, in which a commitment by the nuclear powers to abolition and a negotiated program of nuclear reductions becomes the foundation for an effective policy of nonproliferation, and these lead over time to abolition itself, the only sane goal of nuclear policy for the 21st century.
But history suggests that the impulse for such a profound reorientation of policy is unlikely to come from the political establishment. It must come-as other profound moral and political changes, such as the abolition of slavery, have so often done in American history-from the people. The Urgent Call (page 22) is an instrument offered to help serve this purpose. The bomb is back. But those of us who oppose the bomb are back, too. And we're not going away.
Jonathan Schell, a peace fellow at the Nation Institute, is author of The Fate of the Earth and The Gift of Time: The Case for Abolishing Nuclear Weapons Now. He lives in New York City.
The Bomb is Back. by Jonathan Schell. Sojourners Magazine, November-December 2002 (Vol. 31, No. 6, pp. 20-25, 58-59). Cover.
-------- inspections
For Iraq Inspectors, 'Yellow Cake' and Other Quarries
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 10, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A33208-2002Nov9?language=printer
Any amounts of uranium oxide, called "yellow cake," will be one of the first items the United Nations inspection team will look for in Iraq's declaration, due Dec. 8, of its programs to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
Chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix, a former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency who set in place the 1991 post-Gulf War nuclear monitoring of Iraq, is aware of the recent British intelligence report on Baghdad's attempts to buy "yellow cake" from Niger. He is also aware of the analysis that "Iraq has no active civil nuclear program or nuclear power plants and, therefore, has no legitimate reason to acquire uranium" unless it is eventually producing weapons-grade materials.
Blix and his colleague, Mohammed El Baradei, the current IAEA head who is responsible for the nuclear inspections, believe an initial test for Saddam Hussein's adherence to the new Security Council resolution will be in the evidence he provides to support the claim he is expected to make in the Dec. 8 declaration. They expect him to claim that he has destroyed the chemical and biological weapons he had in 1991 along with the facilities to produce nuclear ones, as well as the means to develop or deliver any new ones.
The declaration must also list all facilities used to build delivery systems for prohibited weapons as well as commercial factories and storage sites for "dual-use" materials and equipment that could be used to build such weapons.
Blix's team has for months been compiling a list of sites it expects Baghdad to declare, based on materials passed on from the previous inspectors, from governments such as the United States and Britain, and from its own analytic team that has been tracking Iraqi purchases for the past two years.
U.S. officials, including President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, have publicly stated that Hussein has hidden stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons and has resumed efforts to build nuclear devices.
Bush administration officials who have long doubted that inspections can disarm the Iraqi leader are focusing on a provision of Friday's U.N. resolution. It requires Iraq's Dec. 8 declaration to be "accurate, full and complete" and that any "false statements or omissions" would constitute "a further material breach" that could trigger a U.S.-led invasion.
"Declarations by Iraq are not evidence," Blix said during a training session for inspectors. "They have to be sustained by evidence from the inspection of sites and/or examination of documentary evidence presented or the interviews of people with relevant knowledge," he added.
Although the U.N. inspectors want evidence from Hussein to prove he does not have prohibited weapons and materials, they also want the United States, Britain and others to provide information, including intelligence data, that can be verified. As Blix told his inspectors: "Intelligence may be very important, but if it is not sustained by evidence, it remains allegations. It is our job to try to verify plausible allegations."
In Senate testimony in September, Rumsfeld said Hussein's regime "has amassed large, clandestine stockpiles of biological weapons -- including anthrax and botulism toxin, and possibly smallpox . . . large, clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons . . . including VX, sarin, cyclosarin and mustard gas . . . [and] has an active program to acquire and develop nuclear weapons."
Iraq's alleged stocks of deadly anthrax provide an example of the issues facing inspectors.
In 1998, a U.N. inspection team estimated that Iraq could have produced two to four times the 8,500 liters it declared in 1991. Iraqi officials told the inspectors they never weaponized anthrax and destroyed all stocks in 1991. Later, the U.N. team found spores in six Iraqi missile warheads.
Meanwhile, an article published last week, saying that U.S. intelligence had reported Iraq had hidden 7,000 liters of anthrax, has been denied by senior administration officials familiar with CIA analyses. "Private experts and perhaps defectors have said that," an official said last week.
Blix has said anthrax is one of many open issues that must be investigated because Iraq produced no records or protocols about the destruction of the biological agent. He expects the Dec. 8 declaration would have some of those records. In addition, Rihab Taha, the British-educated scientist who headed the Iraqi biological weapons program and who is known among inspectors as "Dr. Germ," is still working in Iraq and a prime candidate on inspectors' interview list.
Iraqi missile systems are also on Blix's list. A CIA report said Hussein never "fully accounted" for Iraq's missile programs. Discrepancies in previous Baghdad declarations "suggest" an undetermined number of Scud-type missiles may still exist, the report said. But the United States has not been able to locate those missiles, an intelligence official said.
The CIA and British intelligence have reported that Iraq's newer missiles, prohibited from having a range longer than 150 kilometers, can go much farther and thus are a violation. That also will be an early target for inspectors who expect to place monitoring cameras in missile construction facilities and demand to be present at missile engine tests and missile launchings.
A newer target for inspectors that Iraq is now required to declare will be Iraq's unmanned aerial vehicles. The CIA has said they are capable of delivering biological and perhaps chemical warfare agents. If found to have that capability, they would be destroyed.
As Blix told an audience in Moscow in late October, "Inspectors may be more likely to encounter smoke than smoking guns. However, smoke might be enough to trigger government concern and action." He noted that in the case of discovering North Korea's nuclear activity, inspectors never found the weapons program. Instead, it was the discovery that Pyongyang had been producing more plutonium than had been declared that produced the 1994 crisis.
Iraq's cooperation with the inspectors will be another early test.
"Lack of cooperation, like an offer of good cooperation, sends signals," Blix said in Moscow. "Any denial of access or any other uncooperative conduct," he said, would be reported to the Security Council. The council would decide the consequences, he said, adding, "It is not the inspectors who decide the question of peace and war but the council and its members."
--------
Arab Ministers Welcome U.N. Resolution on Iraq
November 10, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-arabs.html
CAIRO (Reuters) - Arab foreign ministers on Sunday welcomed a new U.N. resolution on disarming Iraq and Egypt's foreign minister said Baghdad appeared positively inclined toward accepting the tough new text.
As the clock ticked for Baghdad to accept the U.N. Security Council's tough new terms or face the threat of military action, delegates at an extraordinary meeting of Arab foreign ministers urged Baghdad and the United Nations to continue cooperating to avert a war which could destabilize the entire region.
Iraq has until November 15 to agree to the U.N. Security Council resolution, which received unanimous backing on Friday. Parliamentary sources in Baghdad said Iraq's parliament would meet in emergency session on Monday to decide a response.
Top weapons inspectors are due to travel to Baghdad on November 18 to set up communications, transport and laboratories.
A statement issued at the Cairo talks said the ministers ``welcome what was mentioned in Resolution 1441 stating that the Security Council is the only appropriate body which can evaluate the reports written by inspectors.''
Asked about Iraq's likely response to the resolution, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher told reporters: ``The indications are positive and there was a general feeling during the meeting that the cooperation of Iraq with the inspectors will be instrumental in avoiding any military operation.''
Asked if Arab ministers had called on Iraq to agree to the new terms, Maher told reporters: ``The Iraqi tendency is positive in general. That's why there was no need to make such a call.''
Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri said earlier in Cairo that his country was still studying Friday's vote.
PRESSURE ON IRAQ
The resolution gives inspectors sweeping new rights and Iraq 30 days to submit a detailed list of its weapons. It also gives the Security Council a key role before any possible attack, but does not force Washington to seek authorization for war.
The resolution and comments from ministers at the Arab League meeting saying the text presented a ray of hope for peace has turned up the heat on Iraq to yield to the U.N.'s demands.
Washington, which accuses Iraq of harboring weapons of mass destruction, has called on Arab states to drive the point home to Baghdad that this was its last chance to avert a strike.
The Arab statement also called on Security Council members who had given assurances to Syria -- the only Arab state on the Council -- that the resolution was not a pretext for a strike, to stick to this commitment and ensure that the new U.N. text is not used as an automatic trigger for a military strike.
Syrian Foreign Minister Farouq al-Shara said his country had only agreed to the resolution after receiving a letter from Secretary of State Colin Powell assuring them the text could not be used as an excuse for military action.
Arab ministers also said they welcomed ``Iraq's unconditional acceptance of the return of international inspectors and urge the continuation of cooperation between the United Nations and Iraq to solve all outstanding problems peacefully.''
Iraq has previously agreed to the unconditional return of the inspectors, whose are to verify the dismantling of banned chemical, biological, nuclear and long-range missile programs. Iraq says all such programs have been dismantled.
Arab ministers also demanded that ``inspection teams carry out their mission with professionalism, complete neutrality and objectivity and that they do not carry out provocative acts so as to ensure their credibility.''
They demanded that Arab experts be included among the inspectors and said Arabs remained ``committed to maintaining Iraq's security, safety, sovereignty and territorial integrity.''
As is common in joint Arab statements, the ministers also called on Israel to heed U.N. resolutions pertaining to the Jewish state. Arabs are particularly concerned about resolutions concerning the return of occupied land.
Disarmament inspections originally started after Iraqi forces were expelled from neighboring Kuwait by a U.S.-led coalition in the 1991 Gulf War. Inspectors withdrew in 1998 in a wrangle over access to President Saddam Hussein's palaces.
-------- israel
Where First Strikes Are Far From the Last Resort
By Aluf Benn,
Washington Post
Sunday, November 10, 2002; Page B03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30629-2002Nov8?language=printer
TEL AVIV
A picture can be worth a thousand strategy papers. While David Ivry was Israel's ambassador to the United States from 1999 to 2002, he displayed in his office a large aerial photograph of the wreckage of Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, which Israel had bombed in 1981 when Ivry commanded the Israeli air force.
At the time of the raid, the Reagan administration, then supporting Saddam Hussein, condemned the Israeli preemptive attack. But after Operation Desert Storm in 1991, Dick Cheney, then defense secretary, sent this photograph to Ivry and wrote on it: "For Gen. David Ivry, with thanks and appreciation for the outstanding job he did on the Iraqi nuclear program in 1981 -- which made our job much easier in Desert Storm."
This week, a senior Israeli delegation will travel to Washington for a periodic "strategic dialogue." The "day after Iraq" scenarios will top the agenda. For the Israelis, it will be another moment of sweet vindication, because the "day before" is not a matter of dispute between Washington and Jerusalem. The Bush administration has embraced Israel's broader strategic approach of preemption. The administration has shown a willingness to hunt down terrorists, attack nascent programs to develop weapons of mass destruction in other countries, and even invade nations to change their governments and deny safe havens to terrorists and other enemies, much as Israel has done for over 50 years.
While an overt policy of preemptive action might be new to Americans, it has been a staple of Israeli defense policy for decades. Since 1951, Israeli military planners have advocated a "first-strike" strategy against imminent threats. In October 1956, under the strain of terror attacks and futile reprisals, Israel launched a "preemptive war" against Egypt, Israel's main adversary at the time, to prevent the use of Czech arms that Cairo had acquired with Soviet help. Regime change was even part of the package: Israel, along with its momentary allies Britain and France (who helped by seizing the newly nationalized Suez Canal), hoped to get rid of Gamal Abdel Nasser's Arab nationalist regime as part of the package.
Though American opposition forced Israel's withdrawal and Nasser remained, the lesson of preemption was not lost on Israelis, especially not on Ariel Sharon, who had commanded the first unit to enter the Sinai. In later years, Israel resorted to preemption several times. The Six Day War of 1967 was a preemptive strike against massive Arab military mobilization, an obvious threat rather than a presumed one, and it changed the political balance and borders. While he was defense minister, Sharon applied the doctrine by invading Lebanon in 1982, ousting Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization from Beirut and enthroning, at least briefly, a loyalist regime there.
The Bush administration has adopted the Israeli approach in its war on terrorism. For the president himself, the Sept. 11 attacks made preemption a top priority. For Cheney and the conservative Pentagon intellectuals, the convergence has been long in coming. Paul D. Wolfowitz, deputy defense secretary, was dispatched by Cheney to Israel during the Persian Gulf War. The Pentagon's number three, Douglas J. Feith, is a former right-wing Jewish activist who opposed the Oslo peace accord. Richard Perle, a key adviser, is close to the Israeli establishment.
In a recent article about the lessons of Osirak, Sharon's cabinet secretary, Gideon Sa'ar, wrote, "The same approach that led the Begin government in 1981, belongs now to the Bush administration." Sa'ar said the White House's recent national security strategy document showed the acceptance of Israel's long-held policy of "initiative, offensive and preventive steps."
The prospect of an American attack on Iraq has produced a rare consensus in Israel, even amid a divisive election campaign. Sharon, Israeli leaders from both camps, and the security establishment have backed the Bush administration's war plans, and urged the United States to act without delay.
In some ways, this is surprising. True, Saddam Hussein is one of the Jewish state's staunchest enemies. His Scud missiles hit Tel Aviv and Haifa during the 1991 Gulf War, piercing Israel's shield of invincibility and denting its ability to deter. And Hussein's nuclear ambitions have threatened Israel's atomic monopoly in the region. In recent years, however, the Israeli establishment has been content to let U.N. sanctions and U.S. and British air attacks keep the Iraqi threat in check. Successive prime ministers (with the notable dissent of Sharon) and military leaders have portrayed Iran as the more dangerous menace. At a security cabinet meeting last week, intelligence chiefs said that Iraq "poses no existential threat" to Israel. So why should Israel rush to support a war, that might expose it to biological or chemical attack? Two plausible reasons: political expediency and strategic vindication.
Facing a stalemated war of attrition with the Palestinians, a crumbling economy and a political crisis at home, the Israeli establishment is craving a deus ex machina to save the country and put it back on a positive strategic and financial path. An American victory over Saddam Hussein would alter the regional environment and position the United States, Israel's main ally, as the chief arbiter in the Middle East.
Some right-wing politicians like Foreign Minister (and former prime minister) Binyamin Netanyahu and cabinet member Natan Sharansky share a personal and ideological affinity with Republican conservatives in Washington. Both have argued for years that Arab democracy is the best guarantor of peace. According to this school of thought, turning Iraq into a model Arab state, run by a pro-Western regime protected by American bayonets, serves Israel's best interests. It would create a positive domino effect, as autocratic regimes throughout the Middle East would have to fight for their survival, and thus have less energy to confront Israel.
This view is widely held at the Qirya, Israel's Pentagon in Tel Aviv. Frustrated by their failure to crush the Palestinian intifada, military leaders pin their hopes on an Iraqi war. The chief of staff, Gen. Moshe ("Bogy") Ya'alon, said last week that a successful American attack in Iraq would force a Palestinian "decision" on a post-Arafat leadership drawn "from the ranks of those who understand that terror and violence will not bring them achievements." The Israel Defense Forces chief intelligence analyst, Brig.-Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser, told the security cabinet that "this is a clash of civilizations" between the West and Islam, and Israel is in the front line.
Israeli military strategists believe that after the fall of Hussein, Israel's other main adversaries, Iran and Syria, would reconsider their support for terrorism, stop arming Hezbollah in Lebanon and abandon their pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Sharon has already called on the United States to target Iran after Baghdad.
From the left-wing perspective, the main advantage of a war would be the resumption of the defunct peace process. Many Israeli officials believe that after taking Baghdad, the United States would try harder to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and even revive the Syrian track. "After Iraq, the United States would not want to paralyze its relations with the Arabs," outgoing foreign minister Shimon Peres says. The logic is simple. If America wins easily, it will need to calm anti-American feelings in the Arab street. If Iraq becomes a second Vietnam, the United States will need Arab support. In both cases, the compensation that Washington's Saudi and Egyptian allies will demand will be pushing Israel out of the occupied territories. The blueprint is already there, in the form of the "road map" that Bush has already laid out for Palestinian statehood and a final-status agreement by 2005.
Most politicians, senior officials and military analysts in Israel anticipate a "day-after" peace process along these lines. They recall how the elder Bush forced Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's right-wing government into the peace process following the Gulf War. A minority opinion, held by foreign ministry officials, holds that after Iraq, the younger Bush will turn to his reelection in 2004. To avoid alienating American Jews and their Christian right allies, the president will refrain from pressuring Israel to compromise. History supports this line. After all, George W.'s father turned against Israel and lost the election.
But the "day after" is still far ahead. First, Israel must endure another fiercely contested election in late January following the collapse of Sharon's coalition last week. The aftermath of war with Iraq would be the next government's business. In the meantime, U.S. war preparations continue, with help from Israel. American forces have received training here in urban fighting, and a senior U.S. military liaison officer visited last week.
Israelis have occasionally had doubts over preemption and regime change. The Lebanon debacle ignited a debate over "wars of choice," similar to the post-Vietnam introspection in the United States. Retired Gen. Israel Tal, the builder of Israel's armored corps and perhaps its most prominent defense theoretician, has long recognized the limits of Israel's power and never advocated regime change in neighboring countries.
Yet after the Persian Gulf War, Tal reconsidered, and supported action against rogue states. "It's important to perfect and institutionalize this model of international intervention to prevent threats to world peace," he wrote in a 1996 book. "Global democratization, if realized, could have an important implication for the general world security, as well as the national security."
Tal warned, though, that "you can enforce a democratic constitution by external force, but it's difficult to forge democratic values -- this could only be the outcome of a long process." He said that while the need for a first-strike war in the face of an imminent threat is indisputable, "preemptive war is debatable, since you have a choice."
Last week, the United States wasn't dwelling on the limits of power; it was testing them. Adopting another Israeli counterterrorism method, U.S. forces assassinated suspected al Qaeda operatives in Yemen, copying a controversial tactic widely used by Israel against the Palestinians, and previously condemned by Washington.
But as it follows Israel's model, the United States should remember that despite many stunning battlefield victories, Israel's acts of preemption have, at best, bought it periods of relative quiet. At worst, they have deepened conflicts. The Six Day War brought occupation. The Lebanon invasion turned into an 18-year quagmire. Only the destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor, a more limited venture, remains an untarnished success. The Israeli experience should instill caution as much as inspiration.
Aluf Benn is the diplomatic correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz.
-------- korea
Nuclear Deceit
By Jim Hoagland
Washington Post
Sunday, November 10, 2002; Page B07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30449-2002Nov8?language=printer
North Korea's determined covert pursuit of new nuclear weapons may stretch back five years and may now be on the verge of success. This much is certain: Pyongyang's recently uncovered nuclear deceit forces the world's powers to reexamine basic attitudes toward proliferation and deterrence.
The deceit was not a solitary, lunatic effort to trick the United States and overturn decades of nonproliferation rules and treaties. This was a calculated, strategic joint venture by North Korea and Pakistan. They conspired to ignore all rules and agreements -- especially Pyongyang's 1994 deal with the Clinton administration to freeze development of nuclear weapons -- and to share the right to possess atomic arsenals and missiles capable of vaporizing their neighbors.
A philosophical line in global nuclear politics has been crossed. Pakistan helped North Korea construct a secret centrifuge system of uranium enrichment in return for missile technology and equipment. But don't assume that this was just a crude barter between two destitute, irresponsible regimes.
This deal was also an implicit statement of revolt that reaches beyond local ambitions to confront India or South Korea or to ensure national survival and sovereignty. Selling or transferring nuclear-weapons material and technology to nations that have no connection to your national survival is a significant new development. That is why the key questions about what has happened -- and why -- must be pursued with Pakistan as well as North Korea.
The Bush administration is disinclined to ask President Pervez Musharraf those questions as the war on al Qaeda continues. That is shortsighted. If Pakistan will break the rules to help a distant pauper Asian dictatorship, how can it say no to rich Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia and Libya when they offer to buy an Islamic bomb? If there is no accounting from Pakistan, the major powers' pretense of control over the spread of nuclear weapons is exposed as one more giant fraud of the past heady decade.
This is Enron and WorldCom to the tenth power, with mushroom clouds in the background. Forensic accountants working with the CIA may have helped nail North Korea's crooked balance sheet. James Kelly, the State Department's top Asia expert, stunned North Korean officials in October by detailing the fraud.
The North Koreans then stunned Kelly by acknowledging the program. They even challenged him to do something about it. Other sources say that the North Koreans possess 2,000 to 3,000 centrifuges and are already enriching uranium.
This description suggests that North Korea is moving relentlessly toward a self-sustaining point of no return in the enrichment process. The numbers alone suggest that North Korea may require no further help from Pakistan to produce new bombs to go with the pair of atomic devices that Pyongyang assembled before the 1994 agreement subjected its plutonium-based program to inspections and a freeze.
"We developed hard confirmation of the program this summer," says a senior Bush administration official, who cited "shards of evidence" of the North Korea-Pakistan nuclear relationship going back to 1997. "Those turned into pretty clear suspicions by 1998, and by 1999 the North Koreans committed to this program."
Clinton administration officials confirm that timeline. Like Bush aides, they say they cannot know whether Pyongyang always intended to subvert the 1994 agreement or inexplicably changed course. But it is clear that the program predates President Bush's election and his placing of North Korea on the "axis of evil." The trigger for the deceit happened on Clinton's more amiable watch.
What to do now? "Well, we won't be getting into an elaborate agreement that depends on North Korea's word," says the Bush official. "We are pushing other nations to make it clear that North Korean entry into the international system can come only after it abandons this program." In plain English: China must apply pressure to its Communist-ruled neighbor, and Japan and South Korea must hold back financial aid and political recognition.
But the problem is broader and graver than North Korea's dying regime. The spread of nuclear weapons is now not only a global fact, but also a project and an intention for some of the Third World's most belligerent and angry regimes. They have watched with envy as Pakistan openly and repeatedly threatened nuclear war to block India's conventional retaliation for cross-border terrorism in and from Kashmir.
The United States must align itself with responsible nuclear powers that do not proliferate. Britain, France, India, Russia and Israel appear to fit that category. They must cooperate to constrain the appetites and abilities of irresponsible nuclear powers. North Korea and Pakistan stand at the top of the list of irresponsibles, and they must not be given leeway to help lengthen it.
----
North Korea Told to Dismantle Nuclear Arms Project Promptly
November 10, 2002
New York Times
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/10/international/asia/10KORE.html
TOKYO, Nov. 9 - The United States, Japan and South Korea called on North Korea today to dismantle its nuclear weapons development program in a "prompt and verifiable manner."
At a meeting here, the three allies also pledged to seek a peaceful resolution of the crisis caused by North Korea's recent admission that it had been secretly developing nuclear weapons, in violation of a number of international agreements.
"North Korea can benefit from greater participation as a member of the international community, but that participation rests on North Korea's prompt and verifiable dismantling of its nuclear weapons programs," said a joint statement issued after the meeting.
However, diplomats here said the discussions, which were held at the assistant foreign minister level, had failed to achieve a consensus on whether to punish North Korea for having broken its commitments or how to do it.
The meeting today comes amid an intense flurry of consultations leading up to a meeting scheduled for Thursday in New York of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, or KEDO, an international consortium that has been building two light-water nuclear reactors for North Korea as part of an agreement with the country that obliges it to surrender its nuclear materials.
Among the three allies, the United States has been pushing for the hardest line, with the Bush administration saying it has no interest in talking further with North Korea until it complies with the nuclear weapons agreements it recently acknowledged violating.
Douglas J. Feith, under secretary of defense for policy, said this week that there was a "fundamental disagreement" between the United States and South Korea over how to deal with the North's nuclear program. In pointed comments to reporters after meeting with Japanese officials here on Friday, Mr. Feith said "there should be a penalty, not a reward" for North Korea's behavior.
Some administration officials are believed to favor the suspension of oil deliveries to North Korea that the United States provides as part of the Agreed Framework, the 1994 commitment by the North not to produce nuclear weapons that led to the start of the power plant construction.
Under the consortium's division of labor, South Korea agreed to provide the nuclear cores for North Korea's new reactors, which are believed to be less prone to weapons proliferation than North Korea's own reactors, which are now under international surveillance. Japan, meanwhile, has committed itself to providing much of the financing.
"It is important to deepen our understanding of each other's positions,"Japan's foreign minister, Yoriko Kawaguchi, said in a statement on Friday.
But despite routine comments emphasizing their common ground, each of the United States' main allies in the region has displayed serious reluctance to support any hard-line approach to North Korea.
South Korea's departing president, Kim Dae Jung, has staked his legacy on reconciliation with the North and has resisted the American approach by pressing on with a series of economic cooperation agreements with North Korea at a time when Washington is calling for more pressure.
Indeed, South Korea announced new agreements with North Korea on cross-border cooperation today while the meeting in Tokyo was under way. "Inter-Korean relations are on a path toward reconciliation and peace, even though they are affected by `turns and twists,' " Mr. Kim said.
Japan, for its part, is locked in talks to normalize relations with the North. Although Japan has said North Korea must comply with its nuclear commitments before new economic cooperation begins, security issues have been trumped here by the drama over the fate of five Japanese citizens kidnapped by North Korea in the late 1970's and early 1980's.
The five are now visiting Japan for the first time since then and their every move is recorded by television crews. Japanese diplomats appear more eager to persuade North Korea to allow the children and spouses of the five to join their relatives here, rather than risk a diplomatic rupture by backing harsh penalities related to the nuclear weapons issue.
North Korea, mindful of the intense Japanese attention to the kidnapping victims, warned Japan on Friday that if it pressed the nuclear issue it would destroy any progress made so far in normalization talks.
----
My Private Seat At Pyongyang's Table
By Don Oberdorfer
Sunday, November 10, 2002
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30631-2002Nov8?language=printer
PYONGYANG, North Korea - Conference Room Number Two in the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is dominated by a highly polished teakwood table under photographs of Kim Il Sung, the nation's founding father, and his son Kim Jong Il, the current leader. Here on the afternoon of Oct. 3, Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly dropped a verbal bombshell that still reverberates throughout Northeast Asia.
Facing Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan, Kelly began the long-awaited first official visit by a member of the Bush administration with an accusation rather than the expected greetings. North Korea, he charged, possesses a secret program to produce highly enriched uranium, the essential component of one type of nuclear weapon, and was therefore violating signed agreements with the United States, South Korea and the International Atomic Energy Agency to keep the divided peninsula nuclear-free.
Minister Kim told me, during an unusual set of meetings that I attended last week in North Korea, that he had been "stunned" by Kelly's statement. He reported Kelly's statements to his superiors at the first coffee break, setting off furious internal consultations. After an all-night meeting of its top officials, North Korea detonated its own verbal explosion the next day. First Deputy Foreign Minister Kang Sok Ju, North Korea's most important diplomat, told Kelly and the U.S. delegation that the reclusive nation is "entitled to have nuclear weapons" to safeguard its security in the face of a growing U.S. threat. After a debate of their own, the Americans interpreted the statement to be an admission that Kelly's charge was true. Now it was the Americans' turn to be stunned by an unexpected declaration and to wonder what to do next.
A month later, both nations are still groping for a way out of their nuclear deadlock. The United States insists that North Korea eliminate its secret nuclear program as the first step toward the renewal of a non-hostile relationship and appears ready to apply pressure if this is not done. North Korea, insisting that U.S. hostility is at the root of its program, is calling for dialogue, while preparing to cast off other nuclear restraints if the confrontation deepens.
After the Kelly visit, no U.S. delegation had sat in Conference Room Two to discuss the impasse until several days ago, when I accompanied Donald Gregg, U.S. ambassador to South Korea under the first President Bush and now president of the Korea Society in New York. In more than nine hours of talks, we heard senior North Korean diplomats and military officers defend their nation's actions and appeal for renewed U.S. engagement. I got the distinct impression that North Korea wishes to end the conflict and would give up its uranium program if face-saving arrangements could be made.
The development of nuclear weapons by North Korea would tilt the military balance on the divided peninsula, where the United States still maintains close to 37,000 troops to defend South Korea almost 50 years after the end of the Korean war. Other countries in the region -- South Korea, Japan and Taiwan -- could follow suit, making Northeast Asia a far more dangerous place. A North Korean atomic bomb could be more dangerous to U.S. interests than weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Unlike the members of the Kelly delegation, Gregg and I are merely private citizens. Displaying no enthusiasm for our visit, the Bush administration refused to let us travel from Seoul to Pyongyang via the demilitarized zone, which is guarded by the U.S.-led United Nations command, even though North Korea had given us a rare approval for the route. We ended up flying from Seoul to Beijing, then taking one of the twice-weekly flights into North Korea's capital.
This was my third visit to Pyongyang. There was more traffic than before, mostly ancient trolley buses, early model Japanese cars, and bicycles, the last notably absent during my 1991 trip there as a Post correspondent. Small, tent-like kiosks selling candy, snacks and other small items have appeared, evidence of economic reforms announced in July. The fields we saw on the outskirts of Pyongyang on a sightseeing outing looked barren and dismal, however.
Our hotel on the banks of a willow-lined river had its own generator. A resident diplomat said it was not unusual to have eight or more power outages a day. Officials we met blamed the power shortage on the United States. After an earlier crisis over North Korean nuclear weapon aspirations in 1994, an Agreed Framework was signed, under which light water nuclear power reactors were to be financed by South Korea and Japan and built under U.S. sponsorship by 2003. In return, North Korea shut down a nuclear plant at Yongbyon that was producing plutonium, the raw material of another type of nuclear weapon. The United States agreed to supply 500,000 tons of heavy fuel oil a year while the reactors were being built. The construction program is five years or so behind schedule. In the present climate, its future is in doubt.
Many Republicans and some Democrats in Congress have condemned this deal as giving in to blackmail. Nonetheless, they have not cut off the funds for the monthly deliveries, to avoid giving North Korea an excuse to restart its plutonium plant and thus trigger a nuclear crisis for which the lawmakers could be blamed. Existing U.S. funds, however, will support shipments only through January.
Critics of the 1994 accord, including some top Bush administration officials, see the new revelations as a golden opportunity to cancel the agreement. North Korea bolstered that case by declaring to Kelly and in some subsequent statements that U.S. threats have "nullified" the agreement. According to Washington sources, President Bush personally intervened several weeks ago to prevent the administration from declaring the Agreed Framework dead, although he is no fan of the accord.
I asked Kang, who was the chief North Korean negotiator of the Agreed Framework, to describe its status. He said it is hanging by "a thread." He confirmed that North Korea believes it is still in force, though precariously so. There is little doubt that if the United States stops delivering the fuel oil, the thread will snap and the agreement cease to exist.
The plutonium plant at Yongbyon, closed under the Agreed Framework, could produce fissionable material far more quickly than the uranium enrichment program, which is believed to be at least two years away from generating enough material for even a single weapon. According to a U.S. estimate, the plant could have produced enough fissionable material for about 100 nuclear weapons by now, had it not been halted in 1994.
In our conversations in Pyongyang, the North Korean diplomats whom Kelly saw and Lt. Gen. Ri Chan Bok of the Korean Peoples Army repeatedly denounced the Bush administration's hostile rhetoric. They expressed concern that the administration, by labeling North Korea a part of the "axis of evil," is paving the way for a preemptive strike aimed at forcing the same kind of "regime change" here that some Americans seek in Iraq. "We are ready to sacrifice ourselves to defend our country against aggression," said Ri, who wore seven rows of campaign ribbons on his khaki tunic. "We won't be slaves by kneeling down, but we will fight."
While not forthrightly confirming Kelly's charge, the officials never denied seeking to enrich uranium in secret facilities, but portrayed their actions as a response to the Bush administration's hostility. When we noted that U.S. officials charge that the enrichment program began during the Clinton administration, when the political climate was warmer, our interlocutors said North Korea has adopted a "neither confirm nor deny" policy about whether the program existed before Bush took office. They also would "neither confirm nor deny" whether North Korea already possesses a nuclear weapon.
Neither in our conversations nor in an Oct. 25 Foreign Ministry statement did the North Koreans request any compensation for ending the enrichment program. They made no demand for a U.S.-North Korean peace treaty to officially end the Korean War, a longstanding proposal of the North. Instead, over and over we heard demands for a non-aggression treaty with the United States to assure North Korea's security.
If such a treaty is negotiated, the North Koreans said, they will "clear the U.S. security concerns," implying an end to the uranium enrichment program. The United States, however, insists that because North Korea has violated existing accords it must verifiably end the enrichment program before new negotiations can begin. "Now the focus is on [North Korea's] actions, not elaborate negotiations or written agreements," Kelly told me before my departure. Vice Foreign Minister Kim said North Korea would like to see "a format of simultaneous action steps" with both sides moving at the same time to end the impasse.
My conversations in Pyongyang persuaded me that a new nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula can be averted if dialogue gets underway -- but it also could be brought on if the Bush administration applies pressure and harsh rhetoric alone. The North Korean officials we saw discussed the situation candidly and, for the most part, coolly, even while displaying resentment of U.S. words and actions. We insisted that the uranium enrichment program will have to be scrapped. The North Koreans appear ready to do that, if the United States accepts their regime as their neighbors have done. They left the door wide open for a peaceful resolution.
If this path is rejected in Washington, however, the future of Northeast Asia could be very different. In that case, the verbal bombshell that Jim Kelly detonated one month ago could prove to be the start of a new and more dangerous conflict on the Korean Peninsula.
Don Oberdorfer, a former Post diplomatic correspondent, is journalist- in-residence at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and author of "The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History" (Basic Books).
-------- missile defense
Anti-artillery laser successfully tested
November 10, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021110-24379412.htm
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Weapons that travel far faster than a speeding bullet are as little as five years from use in combat, say defense officials who used a laser to shoot an artillery shell out of the sky last week in a first-of-its-kind feat.
The Army used a high-energy laser built by TRW Inc. to heat the shell and cause it to explode in flight. The test was successfully repeated a second time.
The shell was fired from a howitzer at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. As it traveled at about 1,000 mph, it was tracked by radar and infrared heat sensors. Then it was locked onto and zapped by the laser beam traveling at light speed.
The Mobile Tactical High-Energy Laser is a short-range weapon being developed with Israel, which wants it to destroy Katyusha rockets fired at its border villages by Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon.
The weapon, which looks like a searchlight, is one of a few laser devices the Pentagon is working on as part of missile defense.
In earlier tests, the Army used the laser to shoot down 25 Katyushas, both singly and in salvos. Artillery shells, however, generate far less heat than rockets do and are more difficult to track. Also, because rockets are pressurized, they are easier to blow up than shells.
"This was, science-wise, a significant accomplishment," said William Congo, a spokesman for the Army Space and Missile Defense Command.
Before, the only defense against a shell was to add more armor, move out of the way or dig in, said Dan Goure, vice president of the Lexington Institute, a nonprofit think tank in Arlington. "Now, in theory, this kind of capability allows you to deny that kind of attack," he said.
The laser could be in use in 2007. Since development began in 1996, the Army, the Israeli Defense Ministry and TRW have spent $250 million on the project.
It is designed for use against shells, mortars, short-range ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and air-to-surface munitions. It could also target helicopters and small aircraft, including robot drones.
Officials hope to shrink the weapon enough to allow it to be mounted on a truck, allowing it to be deployed where needed.
"It's movable; it's not mobile. What we are moving toward is a much smaller, mobile device," Mr. Congo said.
An artist's rendering of the weapon shows it assembled from two tractor-trailers.
The weapon would also have to be nimble enough to destroy multiple rounds as quickly as they are fired.
"Shooting down a single artillery shell is pretty cool, but artillery shells don't come in ones," said Christopher Hellman, a senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information in Washington.
Other related weapons the U.S. military is developing include the Airborne Laser, a $3.7 billion project to mount a laser aboard a Boeing 747. The flying laser is being built to intercept and destroy ballistic missiles shortly after launch.
Also under development are space-based lasers, which would also target ballistic missiles, and ground-based systems that could take out orbiting satellites.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- ohio
Contolled Burn
Van Rose
November 10, 2003
Pike County News Watchman Piketon, Ohio
From: "Vina K Colley" vcolley@earthlink.net
PIKETON - A local environmental activist is labeling a planned burning of vegetation at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant as dangerous.
Government agencies associated with the plant have been planning a controlled burn of the X-611A prairie, an 18-acre plot on the east side of the facility which covers a capped sludge lagoon.
The process is considered to be a safe practice by the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.
Vina Colley, a former plant worker and president of Portsmouth/Piketon Residents for Environmental Safety and Security, is objecting to the burn, stating that contaminants present in the soil could be released into the atmosphere.
Colley bases her judgment on an independent environmental study of plant contamination released last February by Marvin Resnikoff, Ph.D., a senior associate with Radioactive Waste Management Associates in New York, N.Y. It focused primarily upon the plant's Quadrant II, but some attention was given to Quadrant IV, where X-611A is located. According to Resnikoff's findings, traces of plutonium and neptunium exist in that area of the site.
"How can the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and other government agencies give the Portsmouth plant contractor permission to burn this contaminated land?" asked Colley.
"Plutonium is the most dangerous substance on earth. Haven't the Southern Ohio residents and plant workers been harmed enough?"
If grass in the prairie habitat is burned, contaminants will get into the air, said Resnikoff during an interview on Friday. He said residents in the area surrounding the enrichment facility would not "be falling out and dying," but would still be at risk. "If you inhale plutonium and other materials, it increases the chances of cancer to occur," he stated.
Brian Blair, a supervisor with the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency's Division of Emergency and Remedial Response Southeast District Office, doesn't see the burn as a hazard to the environment.
"It just burns the vegetation itself," he said. "It doesn't burn down to the ground."
Blair explained that the burn was scheduled by the U.S. Department of Energy and contractor Bechtel Jacobs Company for November 2 in an effort to control weeds and stimulate the growth of plant life.
However, the operation has been postponed due to rain.
X-611A was once the location of three lagoons, installed in 1954 and used for the disposal of lime sludge waste generated by the enrichment plant. Land was capped in 1999 and a developed into a prairie environment after low levels of chromium, beryllium and uranium were detected.
"It was a concern," said Blair regarding contamination present on the land. "But it was in the lime material. It's covered and beneath the vegetated zone."
The detected materials, he added, existed at concentrations which did not pose an immediate threat to the environment. The Ohio EPA denies the presence of contaminants in the soil.
Despite concern by Colley and her organization, Bechtel Jacobs Spokesperson Sandy Childers announced that the controlled burning should proceed as planned.
"We haven't rescheduled it yet," she said, "but the window of opportunity is through December 31."
Resnikoff does not plan to take an active role in the issue and said he leaves all action against the operation to Colley.
-------- us politics
After Iraq, Bush will attack his real target
By ERIC MARGOLIS -- Contributing Foreign Editor
November 10, 2002
Toronto Sun
http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/margolis_nov10.html
NEW YORK -- President George Bush wrapped himself in the American flag and won a major victory last week as U.S. voters gave control of both houses of Congress to the Republican party. In mid-term elections, the party in power almost always fares badly, but this year an electorate, gripped by fear of terrorism, and whipped into war fever by high-voltage propaganda, voted Republican. Thank you Osama and Saddam.
One poignant photo said it all: Georgia's defeated Democratic senator, Max Cleland, sitting in a wheelchair, missing both legs and an arm lost in combat in Vietnam. This highly decorated hero was defeated by a Vietnam war draft-dodger who had the audacity to accuse Cleland of being "unpatriotic" after the senator courageously voted against giving Bush unlimited war-related powers. I do not recall a more shameful moment in American politics.
Bush's victory is clearly a mandate to proceed with his crusade against Iraq. Preparations for war are in an advanced stage. The U.S. has been quietly moving heavy armour and mechanized units from Europe to the Mideast. Three division equivalents and a Marine heavy brigade are now in theatre. An armada of U.S. warplanes is assembling around Iraq, which is bombed almost daily. U.S. special forces are operating in northern Iraq, and, along with Israeli scout units, in Iraq's western desert near the important H2 airbase. The war could begin as early as mid-December if there is no coup against Saddam Hussein.
But for all the propaganda about wicked Saddam, Iraq is not the main objective for the small but powerful coterie of Pentagon hardliners driving the Bush administration's national security policy. Nor is it for their intellectual and emotional peers in Israel's right-wing Likud party. The real target of the coming war is Iran, which Israel views as its principal and most dangerous enemy. Iraq merely serves as a pretext to whip America into a war frenzy and to justify insertion of large numbers of U.S. troops into Mesopotamia.
A minor threat
Israeli defence officials have long dismissed demolished Iraq as a minor threat, even though it likely has between six and 18 old Scud missiles hidden away. Saddam did not use chemical weapons in 1991 for fear of Israeli nuclear retaliation. Israel now has the world's most advanced anti-missile system, Arrow, with two batteries operational, and numerous batteries of the latest U.S. Patriot missiles in place.
The prevailing view in the Israeli military is that Iraq will be quickly defeated by U.S. forces, and then likely split into two or three cantons. Israel's North American supporters, however, are still being given the party line that Israel is in mortal danger from Iraq.
Iran is a different story. Iran is expected to produce a few nuclear weapons within five years to counter Israel's large nuclear arsenal, and is developing medium-range missiles, Shahab-3s and -4s, that can easily reach Tel Aviv.
With 68 million people and a growing industrial base, Iran is seen by Israel as a serious threat and major Mideast geopolitical rival. Both nations have their eye on Iraq's vast oil reserves.
Israel's newly appointed hardline defence minister, former air force chief Shaul Mofaz, who was born in Iran, has previously threatened to attack Iran's nuclear installations. Thanks to long-range F-15Is supplied by the U.S., plus cruise and ballistic missiles, Israel can strike targets all over Iran. This week, Israel's grand strategy was clearly revealed for the first time, though barely noticed by North American media, as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called for an invasion of Iran "the day after" Iraq is crushed.
Elections in Israel at the end of January will probably return Sharon's Likud party and its extreme rightist allies to power, this time with a strengthened position. Ferocious competition for party leadership between the iron-fisted Sharon and the even more hardline Benjamin Netanyahu suggests a further move to the far right, zero chance for peace with Palestinians, and a more aggressive policy towards Israel's unloving neighbours.
In the U.S., Pentagon hardliners are drawing up plans to invade Iran once Iraq and its oil are "liberated." They hope civil war will erupt in Iran, which is riven by bitterly hostile factions, after which a pro-U.S. regime will take power. If this does not occur, then Iraq-based U.S. forces will be ideally positioned to attack Iran. Or, they could just as well move west and invade Syria, another of Israel's most bitter enemies.
Israel's Likudniks thirst for revenge against Syria - and also Iran - for supporting Lebanon's Hezbollah movement, which drove Israeli forces from Lebanon.
Pentagon superhawk Richard Perle, told the TVO program Diplomatic Immunity that the U.S. was prepared to attack Syria, Iran, and Lebanon.
By February or March, the U.S. media will likely be flooded with dire warnings about the threat to the world from Iran. Israel's American lobby will turn its guns from Iraq to Iran. "Links" will surely be "discovered" between Iran and al-Qaida. The cookie-cutter pattern that worked for whipping up war psychosis against Iraq should work just as well against Iran, Syria or Saudi Arabia - and win the next national election.
Eric can be reached by e-mail at margolis@foreigncorrespondent.com. Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com or visit his home page [http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/margolis_home.html].
----
For Powell, A Long Path To a Victory
Pragmatism, Persistence Led to 15-0 U.N. Vote
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 10, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A33408-2002Nov9?language=printer
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell won two victories on Friday. The most obvious was the unanimous United Nations Security Council approval of tough new weapons inspections in Iraq, a major international achievement for the Bush administration.
But perhaps the sweeter victory for Powell was his vindication as the leader of President Bush's foreign policy team.
After a string of losses to administration hard-liners on issues ranging from the Middle East and Iran to U.S. funding for international population programs, and increasingly public questions about whether he was headed toward resigning, Powell alone stood at President Bush's side in the White House Rose Garden just after the U.N. decision in New York, basking in presidential praise of his "leadership, his good work and his determination" in securing the 15-0 vote.
No one, including Powell, believes the intramural battles over Iraq are over. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's compliance with the resolution, if it happens at all, is expected to be grudging and open to interpretation at every turn. U.S. war plans remain on the table. Even inside the State Department, few believe that Hussein will comply with intrusive new inspections, and there is a feeling that the administration will inevitably confront a decision on war.
Word of new inspections has elicited no comment from the Pentagon. But in Powell's camp, at least, officials are now optimistic that if war does come, it will be an internationally supported effort rather than what many in the world worried would be the vengeful, unilateral strike of an obsessed superpower. And while the administration battle lines are still deeply drawn between the more aggressive views of how to deal with Iraq, represented by Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, and those, led by Powell, who favor at least trying to achieve international consensus, the past three difficult months appear to have helped achieve a more orderly means of decision-making.
As far as Powell is concerned, the National Security Council structure designed to synthesize differences among Cabinet officials worked effectively. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, whose authority in dealing with such high-powered players has long been questioned in Washington, was seen across the board as a fair arbiter in presenting all views to Bush.
In the end, despite the bellicose rhetoric of some senior officials, a certain pragmatism won out.
"Nothing in this administration is calm sailing," said one senior diplomat in Washington. "It is deeply, ideologically split. But in a curious way, common sense has asserted itself thus far. . . . It's really quite extraordinary. Powell is still at it, Rice has held the center," and Bush, far from his original instincts, "has managed to rebuild the Security Council."
At each key decision point over the past three months -- whether to go to the United Nations in the first place; whether to seek a new resolution against Iraq or simply declare that its violation of past demands for disarmament justified immediate U.S. military action; whether to compromise with the views of other nations -- Bush was confronted with opposing views from his top advisers.
And as recounted in interviews with senior White House, State and Defense officials and foreign diplomats, it was a process whose outcome was in doubt every step of the way. A Chance to Make the Case
Iraq returned to the front burner in Washington over the summer after a hiatus during the Afghan war. Most of the talk focused on growing U.S. preparations for war, which provoked by late August a torrent of international calls for Bush not to "go it alone" in attacking Iraq.
In fact, Bush had already decided by that point that he would take his case to the United Nations, overruling administration skeptics who worried that diplomacy would enmesh, and possibly derail, the drive for a military takedown of Hussein's government. Looming large, senior administration officials say, was the case made by Powell during a private White House dinner on Aug. 5, alone with Bush and Rice.
It was not the most auspicious timing for Powell. Bush was about to depart for an extended vacation at his Texas ranch, and the secretary himself had returned only a day before from a grueling trip that took him to six Asian capitals in eight days. He had begun the trip angry; a New York Times report the morning of his departure suggested he was considering resignation, and an editorial said he would never be "a great secretary of state" if he couldn't stand his ground against "the sharks" circling him at the Pentagon and the vice president's office.
But despite his fatigue and preoccupations, "what Colin did very effectively in that dinner was to talk about the upside of making an aggressive approach at the U.N., and the downside of not doing it," a senior official said. The idea he promoted, said another, was to "get the U.N. involved, to broaden the coalition should military action be required and finally, if required, to have a lot of people on the other side to pick Iraq up and put it on its feet."
Bush had little personal use for the United Nations, which he considered a 20th-century organization out of tune with the new threats and demands of the 21st. But he had been hearing about coalition broadening in recent months from British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the foreign leader to whom he felt closest and who shared his belief that Hussein had to be stopped.
So as he began his Texas working holiday, Bush decided he would go to the United Nations, his first strategic decision.
On Aug. 12, national security "principals," including Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Powell, met at the White House to figure out how to proceed. Talk quickly turned to a speech Bush was already scheduled to give at the U.N. General Assembly exactly one month later. The original White House idea was for a boilerplate address on democratic values, but the group decided that it should focus on Iraq and the Security Council's failure since the end of the 1991 Persian Gulf War to deal with Hussein's defiance of its disarmament resolutions. "It was actually the vice president who initially said, you know, these are after all the U.N.'s resolutions, not America's resolutions," recalled one participant, "and we started talking about . . . a challenge to the U.N. to live up to its heritage."
Rice departed for Texas four days later, while the others stayed behind and began wrestling with what would become the president's second key decision -- what his message to the United Nations would be.
Each camp began writing its own draft, with Cheney's staff and Rumsfeld deputy Paul Wolfowitz saying that Bush should simply inform the General Assembly that the United States already had international legal authority to launch a military attack, based on Iraq's "material breach" of a decade's worth of Security Council resolutions. Powell felt that it was worth giving inspections one more chance if it meant that the rest of the world would fight alongside the United States in the face of continued Iraqi defiance.
As Bush prepared for a Labor Day return to Washington, the principals compared their U.N. speech drafts. "We were down to tactical issues," a participant said. "Do you, in the speech, call for a resolution or not? Should it be the president who does that? Should you say 'inspection regime' or not? How detailed should he be about what an acceptable inspection regime should look like?"
On Sept. 4, Bush said publicly for the first time that he would not only address the United Nations on Iraq, but also would seek congressional authorization for a U.S. military attack. Key foreign leaders, nervous at talk of war preparations over the summer, began to weigh in. Russia said it saw no need for either U.S. or U.N. action. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned it would be "unwise to attack Iraq now." And French President Jacques Chirac said the Security Council not only needed a new resolution, but also needed two of them -- one to start new inspections, and a second one later, if necessary, to decide what to do in the event Iraq failed to comply.
Some senior administration officials now insist that there was early internal agreement that the United States would seek a new U.N. resolution on Iraq. Others said that some principals argued strongly that no resolution was needed, nor should one be sought, and when Bush's completed text was distributed just hours before his early morning departure for New York on Sept. 12 with no mention of a new resolution, they appeared to have prevailed.
Powell went into high gear, and the British were called in for reinforcement. Without a call for a new resolution, they argued, the speech would have no punch line, no indication of what the president expected the Security Council to do. Rice, increasingly seen by the "soft side" of the debate as a valuable honest broker and perhaps even an ally in her discussions with Bush, decided to call each of the involved senior advisers that night to say "Look, there really is a decision" to be made. "Do you have any view that you want to express to the president?"
Bush, of course, had the final say. When he stepped to the General Assembly lectern at 10:39 the next morning, he warned of U.N. "irrelevance." He said the threat from Iraq was dire and immediate, and that the United States would not hesitate to defend itself.
And then he formally resolved the difference among his advisers, announcing, "We will work with the U.N. Security Council for the necessary resolutions" to make one more try at securing Iraqi disarmament without war. Code Words and Hard Sell
A high-level interagency group, assigned to begin drafting just such a resolution, quickly agreed on so-called "red lines" for inclusion: It had to declare Iraq already in "material breach" of previous U.N. demands and outline harsh new inspection guidelines that would brook no deception. Most important, it had to promise "serious consequences" for defiance -- code words for war.
Again, each side in the internal debate independently provided passages it insisted must be included. Guidelines from the Pentagon effectively ordered the inclusion of U.S. officials and forces as part of the inspection teams on the ground. The hard-liners insisted that the final, "action" paragraph give advance approval for U.N. members to use "all necessary means" to counter Iraqi failure to cooperate -- language they knew would be interpreted as a trigger for U.S. invasion at will.
Powell and the British argued to no avail that the resolution draft was "totally unsellable in New York," one participant said. The other three permanent members of the council with veto power -- France, Russia and China -- all declared it dead on arrival. But the forces allied with Powell also believed that what one diplomat called "this hideous, extreme resolution" might ultimately prove useful in persuading the council to move toward a less draconian compromise that still would be more powerful than the initial inclinations of most members. A frightened United Nations, they felt, was not a totally bad thing at this stage.
"We always knew . . . 'all necessary means' wasn't going to make it," one senior official said. "There were a few things that were in the 'let's see how people react' category, and we were always going to deal with those."
Senior Defense Department officials insisted they had a guarantee of presidential support for a range of "nonnegotiable" items in the first resolution draft, even as others at the State Department said Powell was acting with complete assurance of Bush's backing. It was here, White House, State and diplomatic officials said, that the British played a key role. Powell was speaking to British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw daily, often several times a day, even as Rice was conferring with her counterpart, David Manning, in Blair's front office, and Blair was repeating to Bush at every opportunity what had become a mantra: that as long as the basic "red lines" were included, having an agreed resolution was more important than insisting on every word. U.S. diplomats began chipping away at the most unacceptable wording, sometimes passing new versions to the French even before they had been seen by others in Washington.
Bush, in this third key decision, agreed to a substantially revised draft that was circulated in New York on Oct. 23. "All necessary means" was gone, and agreement to a "second stage" of council consideration in the event of Iraqi violations, if not a guaranteed second resolution, was included. During a week of consultations between Powell and French Foreign Secretary Dominique de Villepin, it was fine-tuned to within a word or two of French approval.
Throughout the deliberations, Powell had taken care to make sure Bush had enough details to see things his way, including the technicalities of how new inspections would work. A crucial moment in the Washington endgame, several participants in the process agreed, came 10 days ago when Powell invited chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix and Mohamed el Baradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency -- both deeply disdained at the Pentagon as weaklings incapable of standing up to Hussein -- to meet with Bush, Cheney, Rice and Wolfowitz.
"It was very valuable, because you could read very easily in both the body language and what they said that these were completely serious people," said one participant in the meetings. "They had both been through a lot with the Iraqis and a number of other difficult regimes, and they had no desire to be deceived by the Iraqis."
The meetings helped convince Bush that Blix wanted the same tough inspections that he did, and that a pared-down version of the original resolution guidelines would still guarantee intrusive, unyielding inspections. "They acquitted themselves really well," a senior official in Powell's camp said of Blix and el Baradei. Carping stopped at the Pentagon.
Powell launched into an intense, nonstop week of pressure and cajoling on the telephone with London, Paris and Moscow, plus additional talks with his counterparts among the 10 elected members of the council. So consuming were the negotiations that Powell later joked he was still on his cell phone just minutes before his daughter's wedding on Saturday night, switching it off only as he started to walk her up the aisle.
On Thursday, following several final word changes, Bush clinched a final deal over the telephone with Chirac. A conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin was less conclusive, but Putin instructed Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov to keep talking to Powell. Ivanov called an hour before the council vote, at 9 a.m. Friday, to confirm Russia's yes.
The longest holdout was Syria, and an abstention, rather than a no, was the most optimistic prediction. In a last stab Thursday night, Powell had sent a personal message to the Syrian foreign minister, saying that Damascus would be standing alone at the Council, and asked the U.S. ambassador to deliver it verbally, in person. Straw made a call to the Syrian capital, and so did Annan.
Friday morning, as the United States's U.N. ambassador, John Negroponte, was leaving his office across the street from U.N. headquarters for the council vote, he received a call from the Syrians saying they, too, would vote yes. Negroponte used his cell phone to call Powell as he was walking down the U.N. hallway toward the council chamber.
Powell called Rice, and Rice called Bush just as 15 hands were going up around the table, signaling unanimous support for the U.S. resolution.
----
'Baghdad's Moment of Truth,'
By Colin L. Powell
Sunday, November 10, 2002
Washington Post; Page B07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A33592-2002Nov9?language=printer
On Sept. 12, President Bush went before the United Nations and challenged the Security Council to meet its responsibility to act against the threat to international peace and security posed by Iraq. The council's unanimous passage of Resolution 1441 was a historic step for the United Nations toward ridding Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction by peaceful means.
The international community has given Saddam Hussein and his regime one last chance. It is now for Baghdad to seize it.
Seven weeks of consultation, debate and negotiation in the Security Council only forged a deeper agreement and a stronger resolve among the world that Iraq must fully and finally disarm. It should now be clear to Saddam Hussein that this is not just a matter between Iraq and the United States, but between Iraq and a united world.
After 11 years of flouting dozens of U.N. resolutions and statements, Hussein's contempt for the international community is obvious. We are all well acquainted with the tactics of denial, deceit and delay that he has used time and again to avoid compliance. We are also well aware of the brutal and aggressive nature of his regime. He has twice invaded his neighbors and he has used chemical weapons not just against other countries but against his own citizens: men, women and children.
During the four years since inspectors have been barred from Iraq, Hussein has done everything he can to acquire and develop more weapons of mass destruction -- whether biological, chemical or nuclear. He has no scruples about using the weapons that he possesses or about providing them to terrorists should that suit his interests.
Long experience with Saddam Hussein and his regime tells us that he will respond only when confronted with steadfast resolve and the threat of force. Every member of the Security Council understands that if Hussein fails to comply with Resolution 1441, there must be serious consequences.
The words of the resolution are unambiguous:
• The Security Council has found Iraq in material breach of its solemn obligations.
• Iraq has been given one week to state whether it intends to comply with Resolution 1441.
• Iraq must produce a comprehensive declaration of its weapons programs.
• Iraq must submit to an inspection regime that is far tougher and far more thorough than ever before.
Saddam Hussein must give the inspectors immediate, unimpeded, unconditional and unrestricted access to uncover the weapons of mass destruction that he has had so many years to hide. Access not just to places such as presidential palaces but to people and other sources of information will be critical, because you have to know where and when to look in order to find biological and chemical weapons that are easy to conceal and move. Without access to key people and information, the inspectors would have to search under every roof and in the back of every truck.
The chief U.N. inspector, Hans Blix, and the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed El Baradei, have been given the robust regime they need. The United States will support the inspectors in every way. Other U.N. members will do the same. The disarmament process must now begin. The first inspectors plan to arrive in Iraq one week from tomorrow. The world will be watching. The inspectors are required to update the Security Council 60 days after inspections start. Inspectors also are required to inform the council whenever they encounter interference or obstacles. As President Bush said on Friday, U.S. policy will be one of zero tolerance.
In the days and weeks of inspections that lie ahead, the international community can expect Iraq to test its will. Backing Resolution 1441 with the threat of force will be the best way to not only eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction but also to achieve compliance with all U.N. resolutions and reach our ultimate goal: an Iraq that does not threaten its own people, its neighbors and the world.
President Bush and both houses of Congress have emphasized that the United States prefers to see Iraq disarm under U.N. auspices without a resort to force. We do not seek a war with Iraq, we seek its peaceful disarmament. But we will not shrink from war if that is the only way to rid Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. The Security Council has confronted Saddam Hussein and his regime with a moment of truth. If they meet it with more lies, they will not escape the consequences.
The writer is secretary of state.
----
Rice Defends CIA Missile Strike
November 10, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Yemen-al-Qaida.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush has given U.S. officials ``broad authority in a variety of circumstances'' to protect the country, such as the CIA missile strike that killed a top al-Qaida suspect in Yemen, a senior White House aide said Sunday.
``I can assure you that no constitutional questions are raised here. There are authorities that the president can give to officials,'' said his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice.
``He's well within the balance of accepted practice and the letter of his constitutional authority.''
Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, described by U.S. and Yemeni officials as al-Qaida's chief operative in Yemen, was killed Tuesday along with five other men after a CIA Predator drone aircraft fired a missile at their car.
Yemeni and U.S. officials said the dead also included a Yemeni-American man, identified by Yemeni officials as Ahmed Hijazi. According to a U.S. official, Hijazi was linked to alleged members of the al-Qaida cell in suburban Buffalo, N.Y.
Rice would not say who authorized the strike.
``The president has given broad authority to U.S. officials in a variety of circumstances to do what they need to do to protect the country,'' Rice said on ``Fox News Sunday.''
``We're in a new kind of war, and we've made very clear that it is important that this new kind of war be fought on different battlefields.''
She said the United States has had ``very good cooperation with the Yemeni on a variety of things'' and noted that Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh has spoken about that.
``We're fighting on a lot of different fronts. We have a lot of allies in this war,'' Rice said.
The CIA strike also killed four other men described as al-Qaida operatives.
Al-Harethi was believed to have coordinated the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, which killed 17 U.S. sailors.
The U.S. attack last week drew criticism from human rights groups. Amnesty International sent letters of inquiry about the incident to U.S. and Yemeni officials and a spokesman for the group in Washington said the attack violated international treaties prohibiting execution without trial.
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms sales
U.S. Said to Advise Colombia Sale
November 10, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Brazil-Colombia-Aircraft-Sale.html
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) -- The United States has advised Colombia to cancel the purchase of 40 Brazilian fighter planes, a newspaper reported Sunday.
The O Estado de S.Paulo newspaper cited a letter from the commander of U.S. military forces in Latin America, Gen. James T. Hill, to the commander of Colombia's military forces, Jorge Mora Rangel, asking Colombia to reconsider the sale. Advertisement Alt Text
Hill said the $234 million deal for equipment and the Emb-314 light fighter planes, made by Brazil's Embraer, could jeopardize U.S. Congressional approval of future aid to Colombia, the newspaper quoted the letter as saying.
Colombia and Brazil started to negotiate the sale in early October. Embraer was Brazil's biggest exporter last year.
Hill wrote that the Colombian Air Force should use the money for more urgent needs, like modernizing its U.S.-made C-130 Hercules transport planes, the newspaper report said.
A spokesman with the U.S. Southern Command said he was unaware of Hill's letter. Brazil's foreign ministry had no comment on the report, while officials at Brazil's defense ministry were not immediately available for comment. Colombia's military spokeswoman and the country's defense ministry also did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
----
UK forges £1bn secret arms deal with Thailand
Minister agrees to help promote food products linked to cancer
Antony Barnett, public affairs editor
Sunday November 10, 2002
The Observer
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,837136,00.html
Britain has struck a secret deal worth £1 billion to sell arms to Thailand in return for promoting food that has been linked to cancer-causing chemicals.
The deal, which was last night condemned as 'disgraceful' by opposition MPs and farmers, involves Britain selling guns, Hawk jets, riot control equipment and secondhand frigates from the Royal Navy to Thailand.
In return, Britain has agreed to provide financial help to Thailand to develop its farming industry and promote Thai food products in this country and abroad.
The deal was conceived in May, when the Thai prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, visited the UK and met Defence Minister Geoff Hoon and Trade Minister Patricia Hewitt. Hewitt also agreed to help Thailand overturn the European Union ban on the import of Thai chickens.
The ban was introduced after it was discovered that the poultry contained cancer-causing chemicals after farmers had been using illegal veterinary drugs.
The agreement on the highly controversial arms deal was formally signed last month by the British ambassador in Bangkok.
Opposition MPs last night claimed the deal has strong echoes of the arms-for-aid scandals that plagued the Tories and were supposedly outlawed by the Labour government.
The Liberal Democrats have demanded full details of the agreement, questioning what taxpayers' money is being used to support the deal and whether it is compatible with EU free trade policy.
Vince Cable, Lib Dem trade and industry spokesman, who last night wrote to Hewitt, said: 'This is a deeply depressing and disgraceful deal. Linking arms sales with food production gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "swords to ploughshares".
'If the DTI is to promote actively the import of Thai food goods for the sole benefit of BAe Systems, then the Labour government has sunk to a new low in its arms trade policies.'
A spokesman for the Campaign Against the Arms Trade said: 'Not only is this another example of pushing weapons sales on the developing world but to tie it with food production is outrageous and morally unacceptable. It's simply an arms-for-aid scandal in another guise.'
The farming community has also reacted with anger at the deal which it claims threatens jobs.
Ian Johnson, for the National Farmers Union in the South West, said: 'Aside from the moral question, it's extraordinary that the Government which appears to have abandoned British farmers seems to be doing all it can to help farmers in the Third World who will end up exporting cheaper - and some would argue - inferior products into our markets.'
According to reports in the Thai press, under the pact the British government would seek to increase imports of Thai farm produce and help find new markets for Thai goods. In return the Thai government will buy arms from British Aerospace, now known as BAe Systems.
The Department of Trade and Industry last night refused to comment on the deal, but the Foreign Office defended it, saying it will modernise Thai armed forces and help it combat terrorism, at the same time alleviating poverty and improving its food production.
A Foreign Office spokesman denied it was an 'arms-for-aid' deal because it would be BAe Systems investing in Thailand's agriculture sector and not the British state. He said Britain would promote Thai food exports to other parts of the world and not the UK.
A spokesman for BAe said the deal was in an 'embryonic stage' and was a little 'unusual'. But he said it was similar to most major defence deals in which the company agrees to invest in local industry, known as 'offsets'.
In 1997, International Development Secretary Clare Short announced she was banning deals linking arms sales to aid, following the Pergau Dam scandal in which the Conservative government gave Malaysia £300m to help build a controversial dam in exchange for buying British arms. The High Court ruled that former Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd acted unlawfully in allowing such a deal.
-------- biological weapons
Germ - Warfare Negotiators Try Again
November 10, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-UN-Biological-Ban.html
GENEVA (AP) -- Negotiators hoping to protect the world against germ warfare are trying to pick up the pieces a year after the United States shocked other countries by backing out of an enforcement system.
Member countries of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention start a two-week conference Monday to look for new ways to ensure that nations abide by their commitments under the treaty.
The accord has never included enforcement provisions. Discussions on a system of inspections failed last year when the United States withdrew its support, saying inspections cannot detect violations and could compromise self-defense measures.
The United States has accused Iraq of developing biological weapons as part of its arsenal of mass destruction, but Washington -- and independent experts -- suspect other nations also are violating the germ warfare treaty.
``The United States believes that over a dozen countries are pursuing biological weapons,'' said John R. Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control. He has been willing to name only some of them, including Iran, Libya, Sudan, Syria, Cuba and North Korea. All of them except Sudan have signed up to the treaty. Iraq also has signed.
This month's meeting is expected to consider a proposal that would set up annual discussions on different ways to combat biological weapons, said Patricia Lewis, director of the U.N. Institute for Disarmament Research.
The discussions would be nonbinding, but would keep the world thinking about the threat that some nation could develop and use weapons of mass destruction that kill by spreading disease.
``The very worst thing that can happen is that this thing is not discussed at an international level,'' Lewis said.
The discussion idea is based on suggestions from the United States, but the talks are at such a sensitive stage it is uncertain that Washington will back them, she told reporters at a preview briefing.
The Bush administration has given no sign it has budged from its opposition to setting up a system to verify adherence to the treaty.
``Detecting violations is nearly impossible,'' Bolton said. ``Proving a violation is impossible.''
Bolton, who spelled out U.S. policy in a speech last August in Tokyo, said violators can simply claim they were working on defenses against germ warfare and can easily clean up evidence ``by using no more sophisticated means than household bleach.''
Washington says the verification process could work against countries that adhere to the treaty because inspectors might divulge defense and commercial secrets to potential enemies and competitors.
``The United States invests over a billion dollars annually on biodefense,'' Bolton said. ``The U.S pharmaceutical and biotech industry leads the world. Each year U.S. industry produces more than 50 percent of the new medicines created.''
Some countries would use the treaty to import technology and equipment ostensibly for peaceful purposes but, in fact, use them to develop biological weapons, Bolton said.
Lewis said the biggest worry is over biodefense programs.
``Inspectors going into those facilities could gain an awful lot of information about what you believe to be your potential threats and how you're responding to them,'' she said.
Although a majority of the 146 nations that have ratified the treaty favor continuing work on an enforcement mechanism, many have said it would be pointless to carry on without the United States.
A few countries have said privately they were glad Washington opposed further work because they, too, had strong doubts about the plan, she said.
Lewis declined to say which they were, but diplomats said China, Pakistan, Iran and Cuba were unenthusiastic.
Last December, only minutes before the end of the three-week conference on the treaty, the United States moved to end the negotiations to develop an inspection system to search for any violators.
The move took everyone by surprise, even close allies that had been consulting with the United States all day, diplomats said.
The Cold War-era treaty was drawn up without enforcement provisions because no one at the time seriously believed any country would try to use biological weapons.
-------- britain
England Prepping for Possible War
November 10, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Britain-Iraq.html
LONDON (AP) -- Prime Minister Tony Blair's government said Sunday it is preparing for possible military action against Iraq in case diplomatic efforts to disarm Saddam Hussein fail.
Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon said military action would be a last resort, but ``we have to show Saddam Hussein that we mean business.''
``Clearly the United States and indeed the United Kingdom have had a range of military plans available as we do in the event of contingencies developing anywhere in the world,'' Hoon told Sky News.
``We've certainly got to be ready, I don't want to put any specific dates on that but I assure you ... that we are prepared.''
Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri said Saturday that ``no decision has been taken,'' on the United Nations resolution, which calls on the country to dismantle its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons capabilities.
Saddam on Sunday called for an emergency session of parliament to take up a response to the resolution.
But Arab leaders meeting at an Arab League summit in Cairo said Iraq has indicated it will accept the resolution. Saddam on Sunday called an emergency session of parliament to discuss the document.
U.S. officials said a Pentagon plan calls for more than 200,000 troops to invade Iraq, if Baghdad fails to cooperate with weapons inspectors.
Meanwhile, chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix said in an interview published on Sunday that he expected to be in Iraq within a week.
According to an interview with the London-based Arabic newspaper Al-Hayat, Blix said he and Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, would be in Baghdad by Nov. 18 with a preparatory team.
Blix was quoted as saying his inspectors would be firm.
``I don't think we will break in any door. We will behave tactfully, firmly and seriously,'' he was quoted as saying.
The Sunday Telegraph newspaper said Britain would begin mobilizing 15,000 troops next week if Saddam refuses to get rid of his weapons of mass destruction.
Quoting unidentified defense officials, the newspaper said the mobilization would include up to 200 Challenger tanks, warships, submarines and planes.
The Ministry of Defense said the report was speculative and said no decisions would be made until the U.N. weapons inspectors reported back to the United Nations.
Hoon said he expected Iraq to comply with the ``will of the international community.''
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Sunday that Saddam faced ``the choice of his lifetime, literally.''
He told the British Broadcasting Corp. that if Baghdad complies with the resolution, the ``prospect of, and the justification for, military action will recede.''
He said it was likely Saddam would meet the seven-day deadline to accept the resolution. But he said a 30-day deadline for him to disclose his weapons of mass destruction was more important.
``We will know within 30 days whether he is serious about complying,'' Straw said.
-------- europe
Confrontation Over Kaliningrad
Putin Warns of a New 'Berlin Wall' in Dispute With EU
By Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 10, 2002; Page A28
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A33692-2002Nov9?language=printer
KALININGRAD, Russia -- To President Vladimir Putin, this tiny Russian enclave on the Baltic Sea has become an unlikely source of confrontation with Europe.
Putin recently warned that Europe is about to lock away the 1 million residents of Kaliningrad behind a new "Berlin Wall."
An oddity of history and geography bordering on Poland and Lithuania, Kaliningrad is a Russian outpost separated by 200 miles of foreign soil from the Russian "mainland." But in recent months, as Poland and Lithuania have taken the final steps to join the European Union, it has generated the previously unthinkable: a major crisis in relations between Putin and the united Europe he has often talked of joining.
"Russia's geopolitical choice will depend on how the Kaliningrad problem is resolved," Putin's special envoy for the matter, parliamentary leader Dmitri Rogozin, recently vowed.
On Monday, Putin will meet with European leaders at a special Russia-EU summit in Brussels aimed at resolving an impasse over the European plan to introduce visas for travel between Kaliningrad and its neighbors. Currently, Kaliningrad residents can travel freely through Poland and Lithuania, with no visa or foreign passport required, to go to or from the rest of Russia.
Russia has now declared visas an unacceptable requirement, as onerous as if Canada suddenly imposed visas on Alaskans traveling to the lower 48 states. The European Union has been equally opposed to the solution suggested by Russia -- "sealed trains" through a Lithuanian "transit corridor."
In a sign of how emotionally charged the "Kaliningrad question" has become, a Russian woman from a fringe nationalist party threw a cake at a visiting EU delegation this week, shouting, "Kaliningrad was, is and will be ours!"
She was wrong about the history. For 650 years, Kaliningrad was a German trading center known as Konigsberg. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin seized it as a spoil of victory at the end of World War II, renaming the bomb-shattered city, resettling it with Russians and turning the entire region into a secret military installation that was off-limits to foreigners.
But the protester's political pitch was on the mark, capturing the mood in Moscow as Putin stages the biggest confrontation of his presidency between Russia and Europe. Here in Kaliningrad, though, a much more complex story emerges than the one Putin has told, concerning not just the West's willingness to accommodate Russia but also Moscow's willingness to accommodate this region's unique problems.
"Those people who claim to be solving this problem in Moscow are just undertaking a PR campaign," said Solomon Ginzburg, a reformist deputy in the local parliament. He called the visa issue "absolutely exaggerated" and reserved particular scorn for those populist politicians in Moscow who have talked about seizing back territory from Lithuania in retribution for the imposition of visas.
"If you live in a glass house, don't throw stones. Those borders were set after World War II. That's a political danger, especially for Kaliningrad, considering we were never a part of Russia before 1945," Ginzburg said. European diplomats involved in the discussions about Kaliningrad agree with this view, he said.
"The future of Kaliningrad is not in Brussels, it's in Moscow. It's not about visas but about how this region is run," said a European envoy close to the talks. "We shouldn't talk about the isolation of the Kaliningrad region but of the self-isolation of Kaliningrad. And that self-isolation is not done by the local authorities but by Moscow. For Moscow it's just another one of their geopolitical games."
Many European diplomats have been infuriated by the tough Putin rhetoric, obscuring as it does Russia's responsibility for the state of Kaliningrad. "The declarations that the EU is building a new Berlin Wall, that the EU is turning away from Russia, it's not so," said Yaroslav Chybinsky, the Polish consul here.
Kaliningrad's problems go back to the early days of post-communist Russia, when the region was seen as a place of special promise, poised to develop into a capitalist model even faster than the rest of the country, thanks to its favorable location in Europe. A special free-trade zone was established in 1991, and Kaliningrad residents waited expectantly for the Hong Kong-like boom they were sure would come.
Instead, economic decline set in, even worse than elsewhere in Russia.
Outdated manufacturing plants closed, and the region's industrial base has now all but disappeared. Military downsizing left thousands of mid-career officers stuck in Kaliningrad and out of work. Heroin arrived, swiftly followed by an HIV infection rate that was once the highest in Russia.
Rather than becoming a model of global commerce, Kaliningrad became an old-fashioned center of shuttle trading, with thousands of people eking out a living by trekking across the border with loads of cut-rate cigarettes, black-market CDs and other goods to sell in comparatively well-off Poland and Lithuania. This "gray economy" is now thought to account for 40 percent to 60 percent of the region's total trade, experts said.
Visas could make such cross-border trading more difficult, many Kaliningrad residents said in recent interviews, but they are hardly the most important problem the underdeveloped region faces. With their neighbors' standard of living rocketing ahead of theirs, many blame Moscow for ignoring the region's problems or making them worse. Like Ginzburg, many here said the current political storm in Moscow over the visas was just meant to distract attention from the Kremlin's own failure in addressing the Kaliningrad question.
Moscow's indifference is partly a matter of money and partly Putin's political priorities. The special free-trade zone may have made sense for Kaliningrad in the free-wheeling era of President Boris Yeltsin, when Russian regions competed to win the most autonomy from Moscow. But Putin has made restoration of federal control the centerpiece of his presidency and generally prefers centralized solutions.
As a result, many here fear that their "special economic zone" will soon become a relic of the 1990s, incompatible as it is with the Putin style of governance.
"One of the major problems in Russia is unified legislation that doesn't take into consideration the peculiarities of the regions. Especially for Kaliningrad, there should be a more flexible approach, more individualized," said Sylvia Gourova, deputy mayor of Kaliningrad. "But there is no understanding or awareness of this in the federal government."
In the meantime, the modest size of Moscow's financial support of Kaliningrad was apparent during an interview with Mikhail Tsekel, the region's vice governor. Tsekel was quick to brag about the recent package of Kaliningrad projects approved by Moscow, a 10-year, $3.1 billion package of 147 projects.
"Our opponents don't know how much progress has been made," he said.
What he didn't volunteer was the size of the federal government's contribution to that package -- only 9 percent of the total, with another 3 percent supposed to come from regional funds. The rest, the overwhelming majority, is to be privately generated by local business. The package, in other words, is only an elaborate wish list.
Moscow's late arrival to the debate is also evident at the Kaliningrad Economic Development Agency, where the slogan on the wall proclaims, "Russian region, European opportunity," but director Georgy Dykhanov acknowledged, "We are certainly not in Europe yet." More than a decade after the Soviet Union's collapse, his group has just won a contract from the Ministry of Trade and Economic Development in Moscow to develop options for Kaliningrad's future.
Among the possibilities, he said, are Kaliningrad as a sort of overseas colony, compensated for its distance from the Russian motherland with tax breaks and other economic incentives. Or, Dykhanov said, Russia could decide to make Kaliningrad a "bridge" to Europe, investing in infrastructure and first-class facilities to make it the main Russian trading center with the West.
More practical, and less costly, would be to make Kaliningrad a "pilot region," pioneering both domestic economic reforms in Russia and new, closer ties with the EU. But that, too, would require the special treatment Putin has resisted.
Any of these alternatives would require political will that doesn't yet exist in Moscow, Dykhanov said, adding, "Russia itself has yet to decide how to use Kaliningrad."
And while they may be talking about the future here in Kaliningrad, such identity issues are unlikely to predominate in Monday's Russia-EU summit, where old-fashioned dealmaking on the visas, and little else, is likely to result.
"I fear that if the visa question is solved, then nobody will care anymore about Kaliningrad," said Stephan Stein, the German economic representative here, who pointed out that foreign direct investment is only $4 million for the region this year, the rest scared off by "political instability" that seems likely to continue as Kaliningrad's fate is debated in Moscow. "At least it's in the limelight now," he said.
-------- iraq
Pressure Mounts on Iraq to Accept U.N. Demands
November 10, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/news-iraq.html
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq's parliament convenes in an emergency session on Monday to decide on a tough new U.N. resolution calling on Baghdad to disarm or face possible military action.
Iraq has until November 15 to agree to a Security Council resolution passed unanimously on Friday demanding that Baghdad allows U.N. arms experts unhindered access to sites suspected of producing weapons of mass destruction or face ``serious consequences.''
The United States warned Iraq on Sunday one false step in complying with the resolution would result in military action.
Iraqi parliamentary sources told Reuters the 250-seat assembly would meet at 7:00 p.m. (1600 GMT) on Monday in accordance with a decision by President Saddam Hussein.
``Parliament will take the necessary decision regarding the U.N. Security Council resolution,'' one source said.
Top weapons inspectors are due to travel to Iraq on November 18 to set up communications, transport and laboratories.
Signaling hopes for a breakthrough, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher said after an extraordinary meeting of Arab foreign ministers in Cairo on Sunday that Baghdad appeared inclined toward accepting the new text.
``The indications are positive and there was a general feeling during the meeting that the cooperation of Iraq with the inspectors will be instrumental in avoiding any military operation,'' he said when asked about Iraq's likely response.
Asked if ministers had called on Iraq to agree to the U.N. terms, Maher told reporters: ``The Iraqi tendency is positive in general. That's why there was no need to make such a call.''
``ZERO TOLERANCE'' FOR IRAQ
In Washington, U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said Iraq would be held to a ``zero tolerance'' standard on arms inspections under the new resolution. Any breach would trigger serious consequences, she told Fox News Sunday.
Disarmament inspections first started after Iraqi forces were expelled from neighboring Kuwait by a U.S.-led coalition in the 1991 Gulf War. Inspectors withdrew in 1998 in a wrangle over access to Saddam's palaces.
Rice said Bush reserved the right to use force without Security Council approval if Iraq violated the resolution. But Washington would initially discuss with the Council the consequences of any breach.
U.S. officials said President Bush had approved plans for the invasion of Iraq if it failed to comply fully with the resolution.
The plan, based on the lessons learned during the Afghan conflict, calls for the quick capture of Iraqi territory to establish forward bases that would be used to propel 200,000 or more troops deeper into the country.
Saddam on Sunday ordered the Iraqi parliament to hold an emergency meeting on the new resolution. The parliament will then refer its decision to Iraq's highest leadership authority -- the so-called Revolutionary Command Council led by Saddam and chaired by his top aides.
The 250-seat Iraqi parliament will hold closed-door consultations on Monday morning ahead of the plenary session in the evening, another parliamentary source said.
Arab foreign ministers on Sunday endorsed the toughly worded resolution but also called on Security Council members to ensure it could not be used as an automatic trigger for war.
The resolution gives inspectors sweeping new rights and Iraq 30 days to submit a detailed list of its weapons. It also gives the Security Council a key role before any possible attack, but does not force Washington to seek authorization for war.
Chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix is due in Cyprus this week where his team will have a base, before heading for Iraq, a Cyprus government source said.
An advance team of about a dozen inspectors is expected to head for Baghdad around November 25 to make spot inspections. Between 80 and 100 inspectors are due to resume their work in full by December 23.
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Disarming of Iraq still no safe bet
By Howard Witt
Chicago Tribune senior correspondent
November 10, 2002
http://www.chicagotribune.com/templates/misc/printstory.jsp?slug=chi-0211100496nov10
WASHINGTON -- The United Nations has opened the endgame with Saddam Hussein over his weapons of mass destruction, but the outcome that President Bush has somberly ordained--full disarmament--is not at all certain.
As many loopholes as the UN Security Council tried to close with its minutely detailed resolution commanding Iraq to submit to weapons inspections--and as determined as Bush is to strip Iraq of its deadly arsenal--there is still room for Hussein to string out the process.
Moreover, there is space for interpretation of what might constitute a breach of the UN resolution. There may be quarrels over which materials qualify as weapons components.
And there is grave uncertainty, harbored in the highest reaches of the White House, over whether the UN inspectors can ever find all of Hussein's presumed chemical, biological and nuclear materials, even if he throws open every bolted door in his country and welcomes the inspectors to probe every hidden basement.
Few in the Bush administration expect that to happen. At the end of an Arab League meeting late Saturday in Cairo, Egypt's foreign minister, Ahmed Maher, said Iraq had yet to accept the UN resolution, although he said agreement was likely eventually.
Yet most officials calculate that Hussein will balk at some point during the inspections, when UN experts inevitably get too close to the weapons that help sustain his power. And any resistance, Bush has warned repeatedly, will trigger a swift U.S. military response--and Hussein's overthrow.
But if Hussein chooses to cooperate with the inspectors, and if he relinquishes all the weapons they manage to find, he still can avert the showdown that hard-liners in the White House have been itching for ever since the Sept. 11 attacks.
"That's the nightmare scenario: Saddam plays along and manages to seem to get a clean bill of health," said one Pentagon official who declined to be named. "Then how do you show that an invasion would be warranted?"
The administration never had to worry about such a potential predicament when it declared "regime change" to be its ironclad policy toward Iraq earlier this year. But mounting alarm at home and abroad over the prospect of a unilateral U.S. attack on Iraq persuaded the president to take the problem of Hussein's defiance to the United Nations in early September.
Yet winning multinational support for confronting Hussein, Bush found, required a subtle alteration in Washington's language. "Regime change" suddenly became "a changed regime" as Bush allowed that if Hussein succumbed to UN inspections and surrendered his weapons of mass destruction, that would be tantamount to having changed the Iraqi regime, even if Hussein still were in place.
Another concession followed. During two months of painstaking Security Council horse-trading with France and Russia over the terms of the Iraq resolution, the White House ultimately was compelled to agree that any obstructions Iraq might pose to the inspectors would not automatically trigger a U.S. military response, but instead would have to be discussed anew by the Security Council.
White House officials made it clear they saw that change as largely semantic. Bush insisted that he would not be handcuffed by any Security Council deliberations and retained his right, endorsed by Congress, to take action against Iraq if the UN refused to do so.
But semantics are what UN resolutions are all about. It took the shifting of a few clauses and the arcane switch of an "or" to an "and" to get the Security Council to reach unanimity on the Iraq resolution Friday. And it's in the fine print that Hussein may find a way out of his corner, if he chooses to take it.
`Cheat and retreat' feared
The UN resolution instantly started the clock ticking: Iraq has until Nov. 15 to formally accept the terms of the resolution, and three more weeks, until Dec. 8, to disclose a full inventory of its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. The UN weapons inspectors must begin their work by Dec. 23, and within 60 days after that--by Feb. 21 at the latest--the inspectors must report back to the Security Council.
At any point before then, however, if the inspectors run into any Iraqi defiance or obstruction, they are to report the offense immediately to the Security Council, which could trigger an American invasion.
But after 11 years of dodging 16 previous UN resolutions, Hussein is well-practiced in what Bush called Friday "the old game of cheat and retreat."
"Saddam will choose to cooperate, but I would put `cooperation' in quotation marks, because it's not the same as compliance," said Martin Indyk, a Mideast expert at the Brookings Institution and a former U.S. ambassador to Israel. "It means allowing the inspectors to come in, allowing them to do their work, making it look as if he's going along with the resolution. He might even fess up to some [weapons of mass destruction] capabilities to give him some credibility.
"But in essence, what he will be doing here is not making a fundamental decision to disarm, but rather making a calculated decision to play out the clock."
Even if Hussein discloses a roster of Iraq's chemical and biological materials as he is required to do, he can plausibly claim legitimate uses for many of them, because precursor components of potential weapons often have pharmaceutic